Intel has a near-monopoly in the server industry, with its own ads proclaiming that “98 percent of the cloud runs on Intel.” That’s why Microsoft’s pledge to use ARM chips in its severs — hinted at for a while and outlined more fully at the Open Compute Summit this week — is such a big deal. Microsoft is the second biggest cloud company in the US after Amazon, and if it moves even a small bit of its business away from Intel’s products, it threatens the veteran chipmaker’s most lucrative revenue stream, responsible for $7.5 billion operating profit last year.

Speaking to Bloomberg, Microsoft’s vice president of cloud computing, Jason Zander, said the company had made a “significant commitment” to ARM servers — porting its Windows Server…

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